Government-citizen interactions in the tactical approach of street experiments as a pandemic emergency response

Keywords: Active mobility, tactical urbanism, street experiments, public response
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

During the pandemic, cities around the world have employed emergency measures to temporarily repurpose car-dominated streets to active mobility spaces. This initiative was inspired by the concept of tactical urbanism, which advocates for using short-term actions to inform long-term changes in urban development. In contrast to grassroots tactical urbanism projects before the pandemic, the pandemic-induced street experiments were led mainly by the governmental sectors under special permissions. Due to the short reaction time, these policies and plans came without sufficient public consultation, which poses questions about policy fairness during its implementation.

While the existing literature summarizes public responses at a high level based on informants' interviews, there is a lack of systematic collection and analysis of public responses. This research investigates the public response towards the rapidly deployed street experiments to disentangle its interrelationship with initiator reactions and street experiment outcomes.

A surge in online activities during the pandemic enabled public feedback collection from online comments to governmental documents. I selected around 40 cases to analyze their online comments to inform the public feedback and public-initiator interactions. I collected comments from mainstream social media platforms, developed a coding system to categorize the feedback topic, and delineated the interaction loop. The research found that public responses split, with support in the initiative and doubts about the government's implementing capacity and the effectiveness of the policies. Findings may reveal policy fairness that was overlooked during the implementation process due to a lack of public consultation.